BLAME! Master Edition Volume 01 by Tsutomu Nihei

My Alcoholic Escape from Reality by Nagata Kabi

My Wandering Warrior Existence by Nagata Kabi

Dorohedoro Volume 1 by Hayashida Q

Well, im already going through 6 books at the moment, but I don't really wanna force myself to read 100 books in a year (could if I wanted to).

Ok just re-read the post again, I'll aim to read at least 12 books in the year - a book a month.

Right now I want to get through

• Chekov's plays - just finished Ivanov and started The Seagull
• Light over Liskard - haven't yet read it, but the opening page and blurb got me enticed
• Don Quixote - may have to re-read it again
• Laurence Olivier's biography
• The Name of the Wind - just finishing the last chapter, it's fucking amazing
• Inkheart - in the middle of it.

This should be good so far, I'll post a review of each once I finished 'em and give my thoughts on them.

I won't include any Mangas that's ongoing, well they probably deserve another thread somewhere.

Been sleeping on this thread since forever, I think it's about time I finally start. I don't read books often these days, but since I'm learning a language I think reading books in the target language would be the best way to rapidly expand my vocabulary and familiarity with the language.

But that also means that my reading speed would be much, much slower than usual, since I'm not reading it in English. So with that said, put me down for 6 books this year. I think a book every 2 months should be doable. I originally thought I'd be able to read a bit more, but I guess things are getting rather hectic at work as well, so I may not have as much free time to dedicate to this as I'd've liked.

1: Honor and Renown by Glynn Stewart

First book of the year. Prequel to a series I've been reading and was quite good!

Touching up on some of the backlog from last year , listening to Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller atm The writing is pretty good but the sudden Homoerotic scene really threw me off

A Scanner Darkly by Phillip K. Dick

Charlie and The Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl

Starship Titanic by Douglas Adams

The Call of cthulhu H.P. Lovecraft

Carlos Castaneda - The Power of Silence

The Man in the Brown Suite by Agatha Christie

Warriors 1 : Into the Wild by Erin Hunter

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls wilder

Preacher's Fury by William W. Johnstone

Gonna try reading 20 books this time.

I'm gonna try reading 12 books this year.

And I already read one this month.

The Troop by Nick Cutter.

The Troop is about a scoutmaster and a group of scouts on a trip on this island and they are met with an unspeakable crisis. A thin man visits the island and he is infected with killer tapeworms and once the man dies, the scoutmaster and the troops take precaution and try not to get infected. The whole island turns into a quarantine zone and the scouts and the scoutmaster try to survive. Not only that, but one of the scouts is a psychopath and none of the scouts or the scoutmaster knows. So while they're dealing with the worms, the psychopathic scout has some fun by messing with their lives.

Fantastic horror book. It was thrilling and scary and I can't believe all the crap that the scouts and the scoutmaster had to go through to survive. Also, this book scared Stephen King, so that's pretty cool.

Attack of the Flickering Skeletons: More Terrible Old Games You've Probably Never Heard Of by Stuart Ashen

Holy shit I have that book!

I even got the signed copy!

First Time: At least 15!

2. Carmilla

Pretty short, but interesting book. Predates Dracula and focuses on female characters strongly, with atypical male characters. One of about probably five vampire books I'll be adding to my list in the coming months.

2: Kitty Cat Kill Sat by Argus

Instantly goes in my top 10 of all time. It's about a cat who owns a battle satellite! She can talk! She's immortal! The station is definitely haunted! Reviews complain that is it a bit scatter brained but I felt it fit with the theme of the narrator being a cat. The audiobook is exceptional. The narrator really captured the tone of every chapter, going from laugh out loud funny to making you want to cry. The story deals with loss and loneliness but also friendship and belonging. It's a long read but the payoff is so worth it.

3: Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher

I have followed T Kingfisher on Twitter and now Bluesky for a few years now and while her usual horror books aren't quite my thing this was exceptional (It won a Hugo this year!). It's kind of a dark fairytale about a princess but she's the 3rd born and from a small weak kingdom and ends up living in a convent. Her oldest sister is married off to a more powerful kingdom's prince but dies mysteriously. Then the 2nd daughter marries him and it turns out he beats her. Our hero has to go on a quest to accomplish 3 impossible tasks to get the help of a witch who lives in a cemetery and talks to the dead, a barbarian who was captured by the fae and enslaved until she buys him at a fairy market and a dog made of bones. Despite the pretty dark setting the story is quite good. It's not all black and white good vs. evil. And spoiler alert it has a happy ending.

Done reading these books:

5. Die Jury (A Time to Kill), John Grisham, 640 pages

6. Die unheimliche Bibliothek (The Strange Library), Haruki Murakami, 64 pages

7. Die Stad und ihre ungewisse Mauer (The City and Its Uncertain Walls), Haruki Murakami, 672 pages

8. JAB, Un-Su-Kim, 206 pages

A Time to Kill:

A ten years old black girl gets raped, badly beaten up and thrown out of a car - the culprits being two Rednecks, infamous in the area where hey live. Her father Carl Lee Hailey kills both of them when they arrive to do their testimonly in a planned act of vigilantism. Jake Brigance, who knows that Hailey planned the murder because he told him so before, takes up the defense case - but this case gets more and more out of control as more groups try to influence the outcome of the case and an unbiased ruling becomes more and more unlikely and with mayhem stacking up one question remains: will the end of the journey justify the path that led there?

Great, nervewrecking book. I think this is the first book by John Grisham I read.

The Strange Library:

A young boy wants to bring back two books to the library. He also wants to get some books about the tax system in the Ottoman Empire. In the process, he gets imprisoned by an old librarian, deep within the labyrinth under the library. He gets forced to read the three books about the Ottoman Empire; before he doesn't know them fully, he can't leave, the old man claims.

The sheep man, the servant of the librarian and masterful baker of doughnuts, tells the boy that in reality his head will get chopped off and his brain sucked out after a month passes. A mysterious girl, taking the same place as the sheep man, wants to help the boy escaping.

Deals with fear of loneliness, unavoidable loss and materialism. Athmosphere wise, it's similiar to Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

Re-read this as I plan to re-read most of Murakamis works in the near future, starting with the first short story I read by him. (The text above is copied from the 2017 thread).

The City and Its Uncertain Walls:

A city surrounded by walls, only accessible by those who choose to live their shadow around - that's were the True Self of the seventeen year old girl lives that the narrator has fallen in love with. Through uncertain methods, he manages to enter the village, a truly foreign world where he takes up the position of reading dreams, a daunting task, requiring the girl to tend his wounds. As the narrator has grown to love that daily unchanging routine, doubt fills his heart: once his shadow, seperated from him and kept to slowly vanish away is gone completely, he will be stuck in the village forever.

Together, they decide to flee - but the narrator changes his mind and dedides to just let his shadow escape the village - only to find himself wake up outside the village in the real world.

Without direction, his life meanders on and on but he can't forget the girl that has vanished in the real world and so he keeps dreaming about finding a way back to the village to find the True Self of the girl, still keeping care of the villages library. Once he starts working in a small library in a small village in the real world a passage to this once lost place opens up and he has to ask himself - what holds him in this world?

Great book. In some ways, it feels like a more somber re-telling of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, so I would recommend reading that first and this one at a later point.

JAB:

Collection of eight short stories:

Ranging from a student in school looking outside the window, watching the wind move leafs in a magical fashion - and getting punished for not paying atttention. As his inner frustration piles, he picks up boxing and learns the power of the Jab - a fast straight-forward punc; to a a group of bandits getting stuck in a vault and being mostly worried about boredom until they find a golden die and start gambling for the fun of it, to a fancy leather couch haunting a man so much he needs to get rid of it to regain his inner peace and other stories.

Great collection - sadly not available in english.

Hell yeah. That’s like bragging rights

Millenium by John Varley

The Haunting of Crawley House by Michelle Dorey

Sphere by Michael Crichton

The people that time forgot

3. The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowksi

My entry point into the literary world of The Witcher universe. I played The Witcher 2 and The Witcher 3 and watched the first two seasons of the show. I decided to splurge on the box set of all the Witcher books and jump in, and boy am I glad I did. This short story collection was pretty familiar to me since these stories were adapted or hinted at during the games and show, but reading them was a new level of detail. The first day I opened this book I couldn't put it down, I think I read for roughly three hours. I'm about to start the next book, The Sword of Destiny, and couldn't be more excited.

I'm also about to begin Dracula and should within the week finish Remainder by Tom McCarthy.

1. The Color Purple – I was compelled to read this after watching the recent musical. Right from the first damn page, the book was much darker than I thought, with a childlike vocabulary describing the sexual and physical abuse in the first few chapters. The book is structured as letters, mostly written by Celie as she struggles with spousal abuse, same-sex attraction to her husband’s ex-girlfriend, and wondering if she will see her sister again. The book can be depressing to read, but it earns its moments of hope when Celie and her family get their lives improved.

2. This Is How You Lose The Time War – My second reading of this book, this time via audiobook. Originally, I thought it was fine, but the prose was too dense at times. This time, having two narrators reading the book greatly clears up matters, though the text still sounds too poetic in a sense. The methods of how the characters write the letters by some bizarre sci-fi technique is pretty clever, though.

3. Harry Potter and The Cursed Child – The script to the stage play that is canon to the books, for better and for worse. I saw the play on Broadway, which got a post-COVID re-write that condensed the play into 3 hours/1 night. The printed script is based on the original West End version that lasts 5 hours and spread across 2 performances. The big changes between the two versions are the dream scenes being cut, which are no major loss, while increasing the pseudo-romantic moments between Scorpius Malfoy and Albus Potter.

Otherwise, the play still has a convoluted time travel plot and several out of character moments. Even worse, the script doesn’t detail some of the genuinely great special effects and clever set designs that make the play worth seeing.

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers. Last of the Wayfarers series; not entirely sure what to make of it as a finale since I read the first book when it was still somewhat new - which has to mean at least 8 years ago - but I liked it. The whole thing is very good-natured in a way that I know I'd have difficulty writing, where essentially all the drama derives from the characters - all aliens - trying to be kind to each other while the baggage each one brought with them gets in the way.

Planning on picking up Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell next, which means my next update will probably not be for a while unless some fanfic I'm keeping up with wraps up.

You got some treats ahead of you in The Witcher series. One of my personal favorites is Blood of Elves!

This seems fun. Put me down for 12 books!

I've only managed to read 2 stories this month. Good thing that I returned back to my usual goal of 12 books per year.

---

1. Husker du Lena? (Do you remember Lena?)

Of course this is one of those "erotic" stories in Norwegian I started reading last year. This time it's a (light) SM story about a woman looking for single men to have "sex with a hard hand". Our protagonist is married in a "bad marriage" but fortunatley Lena doesn't care about that anyway. Phew.

2. Liliths Opfer (Lilith's victims)

Continued reading the Vampria dime novels, episode 39. I am determined to finish the series this year, only 11 more episodes to go!

In this episode we meet an old acquaintance whom we last saw about 20 novels ago: Espen Storm, the Aboriginal Lilith met a few times already. He returnes to finish off what Lilith didn't do: Killing the people she drank blood from. Lilith refused to do this because she thought people who get bitten by her don't turn into vampires, so there was no point in killing her victims. But: She was SUPPOSED to kill them so they could be reborn as her followers. Something she vehemently opposed to. But the powers that created her have different plans. So, now almost every single one of her victims is now reborn and on their way to what once was called Mesopotamia.

I have about 100 pages left of Sword of Destiny before I start Blood of Elves. Looking forward to reading it!

I finished a few books that I had started in December. Looks like a strong start to the year!

What an Owl Knows by Jennifer Ackerman

what an owl knows, what an owl needs, whatever keeps the owls in the trees and burrowing owls underground snuggling.

Playing the Changes by Nate Chinen

Found out if Jazz is dead, has moved to a different address, or indeed just smells funny. Its not in case you were wondering.

The Unicorn Killer by Candace Nola

This is why you can't trust people who smile.

Cursed Objects by J.W Ocker

Perhaps the real curse is... Man?????!?

The Kybalion by Three Initiates

Reality is an expression of The All which cannot be subtracted, divided, added to or multiplied. So its like... reality is the dream of a sleeping god? Are we perhaps in a snow globe?

The Lesser Key of Solomon by Aleister booty magic Crowley

I read a review that reminded the reviewer of the style an form of legal petitions and complaints. My internal reading voice turned into a drawl civil court judge and it made me chuckle.

Chasing American Monsters by Jason Offutt

There may be a flying dinosaur, homo footus maximus, or (in one instance) just a naked woman running in your backyard.

The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher

Plus-Sized Elf Volume 1 by Synecdoche

Done reading these books:

9. Zernetzt, Anselm Rodenhausen, 382 pages

10. The Last Train, Michael Pronko, 348 pages

Zernetzt:

The new german social platform "Spannwerk" has become the most popular social platform, by far. Phillip, who works for the company wanted to take a 1 year sabbatical but gets brought back into the mold when a new stage for "Spannwerk" is getting tested: by reading and saving the thoughts (brainwaves) of everybody who partakes in the platform a new stage of connection is supposed to be end result. Shortly after taking part in some experiments as tester, Phillip has memory holes and it seems like the company hides some aspects of this new feature.

Solid book. Kind of predictable.

The Last Train:

First book of the detective Hiroshi Shimizu series. An american businessman ends up in front of a train and even though the murderer did really well by using spots that cameras don't have full acces to it becomes clear that the alleged suicide is infact a well calculated murder.

Soon the leads point to the murderer being a tall hostess - not much to go by in a city like Tokio. But Hiroshi and his collegues are entering the dark underbelly of the city to find a murderer that seems more like a phantom at times, with little to no trails left behind.

Great book. Really liked the atmosphere. Read this in english and will read the other books in the series as well.

The end of the first month approaches. If anyone else has updates for January get 'em logged.

@Asandir @Atlas @argile @CappyCatII @Darklion0 @detergent1 @door88 @DrSevenSiezeMD @Frontlined-Backend @Ganon-Dorf @Gimmick @GonzaloAtWork @Haggard @Jackho @JerseyWildcard @JJBoltonNG @Joltopus @Malachy @OneThousandMeeps @Pingu @Prinzy2 @Sheik13LoZ @SlutasaurusRex @TecNoir @TehPoptartKid @The-Great-One @TopazAzul @UnderWhirl @Urichov @Yomuchan @ZJ

I'll be aiming for 15 this year. Also, read a book:

1. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

@Asandir initially recommended this years ago and, though I did get a copy, the fact the formatting forever limits it to a physical book always made it low-priority for someone who primarily reads kindle and moved around a lot at the time. Then MyHouse.wad put it back on my radar last year so I thought I'd casually blaze thru this absolute phonebook of a horror novel for Halloween week and quite fittingly it only took three months longer than expected.

Simultaneously a genuinely unsettling expedition into a wholly fresh take on a spooky house (think @Absurd-Ditties would enjoy the characters and premise of this bit), a fable about art consuming the artist, a love story, an odyssey through the self-destruction-inducing nihilism of modernity complete with obscene tangents placed at maximally hilarious moments, an absolutely feral takedown of the whole concept of academic literary analysis and the exploitative behaviour incentivised by accolades, and probably more.

Got spooked, got misty eyed, laughed, groaned, got obsessed with trying to put the pieces together. I reckon that's literature. Would recommend. Purposely staying vague as this is a labyrinth better experienced than heard described. The 713 page length may sound even scarier than whatever lurks in the depths of the house, but it's actually much shorter than it looks (you'll see) and I also found it more substantive per-page than comparable thickos I've committed to. There's reveals right at the end that had me reeling for days.

May seem like heady reading from these descriptions but it's very accessible and despite a fair amount of classical allusions it feels aimed squarely at people outside the venn diagram of haughty literary types or even at non-readers altogether given both a certain cinematic quality and the fact it revels in the book as a physical object that, somewhat ironically, sets it apart from other novels and makes for a 'one of one' experience all round. At least imo it hits that sweet spot between being accessible and highly ambitious and inventive, and delivers enough authentic payoff to get away with both its vagaries and a refusal to give easy answers.

The whole thing also feels like proto-creepypasta with overlaps into concepts like SCP and the Backrooms so it's certifiably zoomer compatible.

I thought I'd be able to complete the first book this month, but unfortunately work seems to be getting more hectic these days. I currently have like 20 pages to finish, for what it's worth. Thankfully I still have one month of leeway to finish, in the worst case.

4. Remainder by Tom McCarthy

This is one of the oddest books I have ever read. The prose is simple in a good way and flows with ease, which helps keep you focused. This story took me on a long voyage that had me questioning everything in the book and made me hyper-aware of trivial everyday things. Without spoiling anything, I'd recommend anybody looking for an awkward, unique, and very British at times story, to read this.